Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3: Extra-Ordinary Budget Mainboard. Page 10

Today we are going to discuss an entry-level mainboard from Gigabyte on Intel P45 Express chipset. The design of this solution is used as a base for the entire lineup including 14 models. Read about this product in our detailed review.

Gigabyte EasyTune 6

As you remember, the BIOS of Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3 mainboard got smarter. In fact, it turned out smarter than ASUS mainboards’ BIOS. Now during any overclocking the mainboard increases the CPU, memory and chipset voltages set to Auto on its own, and the higher you overclock, the higher it raises the voltages. But how could we check what values it actually sets? HWMonitor utility that I would normally use in this case could only show processor Vcore and Vmem, i.e. those that we can actually see in the PC Health Status section of the BIOS Setup. SO, I had to pull myself together and resort to Gigabyte’s brand name EasyTune 6 utility that I installed from a bundled DVD disk. However, I was very pleasantly surprised: this utility turned out quite nice and functional.

First of all, we no longer see any rockets, dragons or anything like that in the boot-up screen. Instead there appears a very decent interface window with acceptable color scheme and fonts. Everything is clear at first glance and you don’t need to search for any hidden buttons or menus. The first window of Gigabyte EasyTune 6 utility reports all the details about our system CPU:

The next page tells us about the memory. Unfortunately, it reports the SPD info and not the actually set values:

Tuner page in Easy mode allows us to adjust only the FSB frequency:

If we switch to Advanced mode, we will be able to also change the processor frequency multiplier, the memory frequency and PCI Express bus frequency.